Hopefully your "buffs" don't turn out to be nerfs.

Especially when you "buff" power herald with essentially DPS neutral tweaks and then sneak an unsplit pvp balance change that ends up deleting power herald DPS altogether from PvE to the point it's deleted from SC's websites and my power herald ends up doing less DPS than a banner's warrior who not only brings the best offensive group boosts in the game, but great CC and massive breakbar burst damage thanks to the cyclone axe burst.

Meanwhile Unrelenting Assault is still unusable in PvE (spending energy to do less DPS than an unremarkable autoattack chain)despite having been the keystone ability advertised on revenant and both sword 2 and 3 grow weaker the more enemies there are around, making revenant one of the weakest cleaving classes on top of already having underperforming single target DPS.

Investing on traits for might on top of sacrificing energy usage and DPS to only upkeep 12-13 stacks of might while a warrior picks up a single trait and stacks 25 might just like a druid, or renegade presses F2 to maintain 20-25 stacks of might. Renegade is an even better supportive boon spec than power herald is on top of being a better pve dps spec as well.

Honorable mentions also go to power reaper who for some reason received also PvE nerfs courtesy of pvp balancing.

4

Comments

As a necromancer main (and fan) I whole-heartedly agree with this thread's title. Not just for necro's sake, but for any profession's sake. The 'necromancer treatment' isn't fun, no matter which profession it is applied to.

Do you want a balanced GW2? Then you are obliged to unironically agree with this suggestion!

@Auburner.6945 said:
I won't mind buffs or nerfs as long as there is a convincing reason, a reasonable reason it is. And also a reasonable reason to why some broken stuff are still running out there untouched.

They said their reasons. Theyw anted to bring up underperforming power herald DPS and gave the shiro true nature some marginal gain and then at the same time increased the cast time of OH skill 4, effectively doubling the cast time. This was a significantly larger throughput nerf that completely eclipsed the shiro true nature buff and so power herald became WORSE.

They did the same for power reaper, supposedly putting power into soul barbs only to remove the 5% damage modifier from soul reaping for no reason and it turns out that a measly 10% damage buff with a significantly worse uptime resulted in a net DPS loss for the power reaper.

They simply do NOT playtest these changes with anyone knowledgeable in endgame PvE or otherwise the changes wouldn't have gone through.

In both cases these were obvious changes to bring both specs down in PvP with token buffs for PvE that could not overcome the unsplit nerfs.

They nerfed sword 4 cast time because a few plebs with pve spec and zerk gear cried they died in 2 hits against a rev ( meanwhile mirage, thieves and other classes can do worse with much better sustain and consistent damage) they did not even bothered to split the changes for pve and pvp and called it a day, we improved power rev dps ! Their logic is beyond me tbh.

All these bad design decisions made me simply quit the game. It’s just so annoying having to wait 3 months + to get changes only to be disappointed again by unecessary nerfs/bad design decisions.

You are also right about testing and feedback. Players told Anet time and time again but they do not care.
Say what you want about Activision or Blizzard but at least they got PTR and feedback is taken into account during testing.

@Zenith.7301 said:
They did the same for power reaper, supposedly putting power into soul barbs only to remove the 5% damage modifier from soul reaping for no reason and it turns out that a measly 10% damage buff with a significantly worse uptime resulted in a net DPS loss for the power reaper.

In both cases these were obvious changes to bring both specs down in PvP with token buffs for PvE that could not overcome the unsplit nerfs.

Well, this is arguable since improving something doesn't always result in an "increase". In both case ANet seeked the active use of a profession mechanism instead of the passive benefit of a trait. Yes, it end up with a dps loss but it also end up with a more "active" use of the game mechanism, which can be seen as answering the concern voiced by the players about "to many passives in the game".

I'm not saying that what ANet did was good or bad, just that the game is a "whole" and ANet tend to try to answer the whole thing as much as possible instead of focusing on a single aspect that can lead to imbalance in other part of the game and add "game splits". Even if they have the tools to do it, ANet just don't want to rely on game split for their overall balance and in a way it's understandable.

@Zenith.7301 said:
They did the same for power reaper, supposedly putting power into soul barbs only to remove the 5% damage modifier from soul reaping for no reason and it turns out that a measly 10% damage buff with a significantly worse uptime resulted in a net DPS loss for the power reaper.

Soul Barbs itself is a damage buff. The reason it ended up in an overall nerf was the removal of trait proc criticals (for PvE builds: esp. Chilling Nova) and the shroud skill cooldown nerf from 20 to 15% which all in all costed more than 5% dps which Soul Barbs could not compensate.

@Scar.1793 said:
You are also right about testing and feedback. Players told Anet time and time again but they do not care.
Say what you want about Activision or Blizzard but at least they got PTR and feedback is taken into account during testing.

You obviously never played on the PTR. Blizzard is notorious for not listening and pushing unfinished/buggy kitten out to the live servers even with pages upon pages of feedback on the PTR forum.

@Scar.1793 said:
You are also right about testing and feedback. Players told Anet time and time again but they do not care.
Say what you want about Activision or Blizzard but at least they got PTR and feedback is taken into account during testing.

You obviously never played on the PTR. Blizzard is notorious for not listening and pushing unfinished/buggy kitten out to the live servers even with pages upon pages of feedback on the PTR forum.

An outright lie. Multiple tuning changes to proposed changes have come out of the PTR, and you don't even need Blizzard because ESO also has iterated changes on PTS and if you don't want to talk about MMO's, MOBAs like LoL change their proposed changes based on feedback on the PBE all the time.

Blizzard also has a lengthy beta period out of which changes are iterated on (even if they are not the changes people want, some of the feedback does make it to the changes).

Anet on the other hand doesn't even bother to preview the patch notes to the players, but they outright don't care about player feedback when they do balancing.

The single closest thing we had to PTR was the beta weekends on HoT in which they dedicated 2 weekends to feedback on elite professions for almost all specs (druid, since it was one of the last specs, only got screwed with 1 weekend). And changes did come out of those minuscule PTR approximations like the mesmer shield phantasms being made actually functional since before what they did was throw a bouncing shield that would randomly slow some targets and apply alacrity to SOME, making the shield phantasm skill terrible and the fact deja vu at first could only trigger the phantasm upon blocking which meant mesmers in PvE content could not reliably get phantasms up.

In PoF we didn't even get class specific beta weekends and at best we got a single open world PVE beta weekend.

Anet has been pretty clear that they don't care to iterate on class balance alongside the community.

@Scar.1793 said:
You are also right about testing and feedback. Players told Anet time and time again but they do not care.
Say what you want about Activision or Blizzard but at least they got PTR and feedback is taken into account during testing.

You obviously never played on the PTR. Blizzard is notorious for not listening and pushing unfinished/buggy kitten out to the live servers even with pages upon pages of feedback on the PTR forum.

An outright lie. Multiple tuning changes to proposed changes have come out of the PTR, and you don't even need Blizzard because ESO also has iterated changes on PTS and if you don't want to talk about MMO's, MOBAs like LoL change their proposed changes based on feedback on the PBE all the time.

Blizzard also has a lengthy beta period out of which changes are iterated on (even if they are not the changes people want, some of the feedback does make it to the changes).

Anet on the other hand doesn't even bother to preview the patch notes to the players, but they outright don't care about player feedback when they do balancing.

The single closest thing we had to PTR was the beta weekends on HoT in which they dedicated 2 weekends to feedback on elite professions for almost all specs (druid, since it was one of the last specs, only got screwed with 1 weekend). And changes did come out of those minuscule PTR approximations like the mesmer shield phantasms being made actually functional since before what they did was throw a bouncing shield that would randomly slow some targets and apply alacrity to SOME, making the shield phantasm skill terrible and the fact deja vu at first could only trigger the phantasm upon blocking which meant mesmers in PvE content could not reliably get phantasms up.

In PoF we didn't even get class specific beta weekends and at best we got a single open world PVE beta weekend.

Anet has been pretty clear that they don't care to iterate on class balance alongside the community.

This^
arenanet should preview patches to players pre release and provide a feedback thread for each class,than once changes are released they should be considered in testing for first month. At the end of the month after arenet has played the builds,players have played the builds and combined with with the feedback can actually make a informed descision. What we have now is barely tested changes that either end up ruining builds or are way overpowered and don’t get changed for a ridiculous amount of time.

@Auburner.6945 said:
I won't mind buffs or nerfs as long as there is a convincing reason, a reasonable reason it is. And also a reasonable reason to why some broken stuff are still running out there untouched.

They said their reasons. Theyw anted to bring up underperforming power herald DPS and gave the shiro true nature some marginal gain and then at the same time increased the cast time of OH skill 4, effectively doubling the cast time. This was a significantly larger throughput nerf that completely eclipsed the shiro true nature buff and so power herald became WORSE.

They did the same for power reaper, supposedly putting power into soul barbs only to remove the 5% damage modifier from soul reaping for no reason and it turns out that a measly 10% damage buff with a significantly worse uptime resulted in a net DPS loss for the power reaper.

They simply do NOT playtest these changes with anyone knowledgeable in endgame PvE or otherwise the changes wouldn't have gone through.

In both cases these were obvious changes to bring both specs down in PvP with token buffs for PvE that could not overcome the unsplit nerfs.

When does Anet ever test anything lol. This is why every single patch keeps addressing the same issues, yet they still remain. Like the example you gave power rev damage in PvE. No one bothers to test kitten.

@Zenith.7301 said:
They did the same for power reaper, supposedly putting power into soul barbs only to remove the 5% damage modifier from soul reaping for no reason and it turns out that a measly 10% damage buff with a significantly worse uptime resulted in a net DPS loss for the power reaper.

Soul Barbs itself is a damage buff. The reason it ended up in an overall nerf was the removal of trait proc criticals (for PvE builds: esp. Chilling Nova) and the shroud skill cooldown nerf from 20 to 15% which all in all costed more than 5% dps which Soul Barbs could not compensate.

Soul barbs is mainly a dmg buff for PvP modes, as opponents can't just hit you, so you fall below 50% lifeforce. But even there it's a nerf as well, because the opponent can see the buff and makes it more visible, when necro is able To go into shroud again. Not to mention the huge sustain loss from passive spectral armor.

For pve it was a nerf as it turns out you have to be much faster rotation wise and have to be even more aware of animation cancel

The passive traits not being able to crit was the true nerf. For shroud entry procs I could understand the needs, but not for chilling nova.

Chilling nova required the opponent to be chilled and you have to critically hit the enemy, and even then chilling nova wasn't a guaranteed critical hit in PvP modes. While for example ele just has to attune to air and is able to crit or engi has to use toolbelt and is able to crit (static discharge)

@Zenith.7301 said:
They did the same for power reaper, supposedly putting power into soul barbs only to remove the 5% damage modifier from soul reaping for no reason and it turns out that a measly 10% damage buff with a significantly worse uptime resulted in a net DPS loss for the power reaper.

Soul Barbs itself is a damage buff. The reason it ended up in an overall nerf was the removal of trait proc criticals (for PvE builds: esp. Chilling Nova) and the shroud skill cooldown nerf from 20 to 15% which all in all costed more than 5% dps which Soul Barbs could not compensate.

Soul barbs is mainly a dmg buff for PvP modes, as opponents can't just hit you, so you fall below 50% lifeforce. But even there it's a nerf as well, because the opponent can see the buff and makes it more visible, when necro is able To go into shroud again. Not to mention the huge sustain loss from passive spectral armor.

For pve it was a nerf as it turns out you have to be much faster rotation wise and have to be even more aware of animation cancel

The passive traits not being able to crit was the true nerf. For shroud entry procs I could understand the needs, but not for chilling nova.

Chilling nova required the opponent to be chilled and you have to critically hit the enemy, and even then chilling nova wasn't a guaranteed critical hit in PvP modes. While for example ele just has to attune to air and is able to crit or engi has to use toolbelt and is able to crit (static discharge)

Why did necro not receive the same treatment here?

ANet aimed for compensations of spectral and shroud proc nerfs. That's the basis.

For PvE: Soul Barbs should compensate the proc damage loss but they did not test properly whether 10% was enough, because it was not.

For PvP: A mix of the shroud skill cooldown trait (which became baseline), the buffed spectral walk, additional 5% life force via SR and the option for either Soul Barbs (= more burst) or vital persistence (= better healing + more vitality) should do the job. But like for PvE they did underestimate the impact of their nerfs and ended up in an overal nerf. Everyone who played reaper at least semi competitive knew the spec was a proccing one trick pony and a few modifications of SR would not change reaper to a spec that is viable without proccs.

Anything else than a flat out buff to necro sustain (main candidates: spectral armor cast-time/duration, soul eater regeneration, flesh wurm cast-time) in the next balance patch is a further proof of incompetence.

Alternatively they could double the bonus of Soul Barbs to 20% in both PvE and PvP to improve dps for PvE and allow us to gear more tanky for PvP while maintaining damage output.

@Zenith.7301 said:
They did the same for power reaper, supposedly putting power into soul barbs only to remove the 5% damage modifier from soul reaping for no reason and it turns out that a measly 10% damage buff with a significantly worse uptime resulted in a net DPS loss for the power reaper.

Soul Barbs itself is a damage buff. The reason it ended up in an overall nerf was the removal of trait proc criticals (for PvE builds: esp. Chilling Nova) and the shroud skill cooldown nerf from 20 to 15% which all in all costed more than 5% dps which Soul Barbs could not compensate.

Soul barbs is mainly a dmg buff for PvP modes, as opponents can't just hit you, so you fall below 50% lifeforce. But even there it's a nerf as well, because the opponent can see the buff and makes it more visible, when necro is able To go into shroud again. Not to mention the huge sustain loss from passive spectral armor.

For pve it was a nerf as it turns out you have to be much faster rotation wise and have to be even more aware of animation cancel

The passive traits not being able to crit was the true nerf. For shroud entry procs I could understand the needs, but not for chilling nova.

Chilling nova required the opponent to be chilled and you have to critically hit the enemy, and even then chilling nova wasn't a guaranteed critical hit in PvP modes. While for example ele just has to attune to air and is able to crit or engi has to use toolbelt and is able to crit (static discharge)

Why did necro not receive the same treatment here?

ANet aimed for compensations of spectral and shroud proc nerfs. That's the basis.

For PvE: Soul Barbs should compensate the proc damage loss but they did not test properly whether 10% was enough, because it was not.

No that was never the intention as they removed the dmg buff from the last minor trait, that gave 10%dmg while above 50%lf

For PvP: A mix of the shroud skill cooldown trait (which became baseline), the buffed spectral walk, additional 5% life force via SR and the option for either Soul Barbs (= more burst) or vital persistence (= better healing + more vitality) should do the job. But like for PvE they did underestimate the impact of their nerfs and ended up in an overal nerf. Everyone who played reaper at least semi competitive knew the spec was a proccing one trick pony and a few modifications of SR would not change reaper to a spec that is viable without proccs.

In pve reaper didn't really have proccs (if you don't count death perception and reapers onslaught.) The only one with an active dmg proc, chilling nova was heavily nerfed and not treated the same way they did with ele and engi.

Anything else than a flat out buff to necro sustain (main candidates: spectral armor cast-time/duration, soul eater regeneration, flesh wurm cast-time) in the next balance patch is a further proof of incompetence.

Alternatively they could double the bonus of Soul Barbs to 20% in both PvE and PvP to improve dps for PvE and allow us to gear more tanky for PvP while maintaining damage output.

"Inspiring Reinforcement: This skill can no longer hit the same target multiple times in a single cast."

They did it again, please stop, this stopped being funny months ago. For the uneducated this change guts power rev damage against large hit-boxes which was the only situation where it wasn't trash tier dps, the other changes this patch do not come close to being adequate compensation and power rev is even more bottom tier in pve than it already was.

@ArthurDent.9538 said:
"Inspiring Reinforcement: This skill can no longer hit the same target multiple times in a single cast."

They did it again, please stop, this stopped being funny months ago. For the uneducated this change guts power rev damage against large hit-boxes which was the only situation where it wasn't trash tier dps, the other changes this patch do not come close to being adequate compensation and power rev is even more bottom tier in pve than it already was.

@ Systems team, every patch I keep thinking you can't possibly make pve power rev worse this patch and you all keep going "Hold my beer!" and then you actually go out and do even though you acknowledge it is struggling, I guess math is hard.

@ArthurDent.9538 said:
"Inspiring Reinforcement: This skill can no longer hit the same target multiple times in a single cast."

They did it again, please stop, this stopped being funny months ago. For the uneducated this change guts power rev damage against large hit-boxes which was the only situation where it wasn't trash tier dps, the other changes this patch do not come close to being adequate compensation and power rev is even more bottom tier in pve than it already was.

@ Systems team, every patch I keep thinking you can't possibly make pve power rev worse this patch and you all keep going "Hold my beer!" and then you actually go out and do even though you acknowledge it is struggling, I guess math is hard.

Hey! At least they didn't try to make a weapon combo more lethal for Rev! They sure as hell did a good job for it on thief P/D! Except, it's more like thief is pointing the gun at themselves now.